


Payback

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:38:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4840955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily resents the fact that after everything Snow and Charming did to prevent Emma becoming dark, Emma has become dark anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Payback

Henry was wandering around insisting that there was some way that Emma could be turned back to herself, that good would always win, and they’d find Merlin and make sure he turned her back. Regina was going round with a long face, feeling guilty that Emma chose to sacrifice herself so that Regina could have her happy ending with Robin. Mary Margaret and David were bickering about whose fault it all was and whether they could have done anything differently to prevent it.

“Yeah, you could have done something differently,” Lily felt like saying. “You could have not done that stupid spell in the first place.” What had Snow and Charming achieved? They’d caused Lily to live her life separated from her mother, believing for years that her mother may not have even wanted her, being passed from crappy foster home to crappy foster home before eventually finding herself in that adoptive placement – she couldn’t even call that a home, since she certainly never felt like she belonged there.

She could tell herself all she liked that if Snow and Charming had never done that and Maleficent had been able to keep her, she would never have had the chance to live any kind of life at all, because she would have been trapped in her baby form for the 28 years of the curse. Before Emma disappeared, she and Lily had had that conversation where Emma had talked about her anger towards Snow for having sent her through to this world alone, even though she knew that if Snow had kept her she would have remained trapped as a newborn, unable to break the curse. But Lily isn’t sure that the life she’s had has really been any better. Okay, so she would still be a baby now had that happened, but she would have been raised by her mother, had the chance to build a proper relationship with her, wouldn’t have had to spend her life in all those foster homes.

And she would have had hope for her future, even if that future had been in Storybrooke. She could have had friendships, maybe even relationships, she could have built those up without having the need to fear the rejection, the pushing people away, that she had faced every time she had tried to form any attachments, from her old foster parents to Emma. She could have had something better for herself than working in that stupid gas station using a name that wasn’t even her own.

Maleficent approached Lily, looking wary as though she expected Lily to push her away again. Instead, Maleficent was the only person she wanted to see right now. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?” Lily asked. “You’re thinking about all those years we could have spent together, everything we could have had.”

Maleficent nodded. “How it was all done for Emma Swan, to stop her from becoming dark, and now look at her, on the way to becoming darker than Rumpel himself.”

Lily looked at Maleficent. “Remember what you said about trying to teach me about being a scary dragon bitch?”

Maleficent smiled. “I remember. And you were right. I think now’s the time for me to go back to being that.”

“And you definitely have to teach me too.” Lily looked at her mother and felt for the first time that they understood each other. Snow and Charming had ruined Lily and Maleficent’s lives for what had turned out to be nothing; and while Lily and Maleficent couldn’t take back all the years they had been deprived of, they could do what they could to make sure Snow and Charming knew that they hadn’t got away with it. They would know the misery that Lily and Maleficent had known, and Lily and Maleficent would be the ones to give it to them.


End file.
